If you've been paying attention, you'll know that BlackBerry (née RIM) unveiled its long-awaited BlackBerry Z10 and Q10 handsets today alongside the BlackBerry 10 operating system. Our full reviews of both the Z10 (which we were given as we left the press event) and the BlackBerry 10 OS themselves will be here in the next few days, but in the meantime we have one question: just how fast are these phones?

BlackBerry was coy about announcing official pricing ahead of the phones' actual US launch sometime in mid-March—$149 with a contract was suggested for the Canadian launch, and Verizon bumped that up to $199 with a two-year contract—but it's clear that the Z10 will be priced against premium phones from entrenched competitors rather than $100 midrange handsets or low-end, free-with-contract phones.

The problem with measuring how well a smartphone on a new or less-popular software platform performs is that most of our common benchmarking tools—things like Geekbench and GLBenchmark—simply aren't available for download. Luckily for us, we have in our possession an Android phone with tech specs very similar to the Z10: Samsung's Galaxy S III uses an identical dual-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 SoC (part number MSM8960).

This allows us to do two things: use the S III as a rough stand-in when measuring the Z10's raw performance, and perform something akin to an apples-to-apples comparison between the BlackBerry 10 browser and Android's browser (and Google Chrome)—a definite priority, given how integral the browser is to the smartphone experience. We ran some quick tests on both phones to give you a preview of its performance ahead of the full review.

It's worth noting, however, that while the numbers will offer a good idea of the kind of raw performance you can expect from the Z10 in the best cases, the actual performance will be affected by the OS due to differences in drivers and power management between Android and BlackBerry 10.

Note that, for our purposes, we'll be discussing mostly the US version of the Z10—as sometimes happens, the international version of the phone will be shipping with an OMAP 4470 from Texas Instruments.

The Snapdragon S4 Plus revisited

The US version of the Samsung Galaxy S III uses identical hardware on the inside, making it ideal for a performance comparison.

Casey Johnston

The dual-core Snapdragon S4 Plus CPU cores (codenamed Krait) in both phones, as well as their accompanying Adreno 225 GPUs, have been eclipsed in performance by several chips at this point. These include Apple's A6 SoC family, Samsung's Exynos 5 Dual, and Qualcomm's own Snapdragon S4 Pro, the latter of which drives LG's Optimus G and Nexus 4, among others. It doesn't mean that the S4 Plus is slow—just that it's no longer cutting edge, and it will be even less cutting edge by March. Our first graphs will put it into context for you.

For these benchmarks, we tried to pick phones that represented a fairly wide variety of hardware—cutting-edge silicon, like that in the Nexus 4 and iPhone 5; squarely last-generation hardware such as the iPhone 4S and the Galaxy Nexus; and the Galaxy S III, which should fall right in the middle of the pack in most respects.

In the Geekbench CPU tests, this is largely true—it's slower than the Nexus 4 and iPhone 5 (and faster than the Galaxy Nexus and iPhone 4S) in most respects, with a few exceptions. The quad-core S4 Pro in the Nexus 4 obviously shares a memory controller in common with the S4 Plus (hence the identical numbers); otherwise the raw performance of the S III and the Z10 is good but not quite at the top of the pile.

Note: Due to Vsync, scores for the GLBenchmark Onscreen tests are capped at 60 frames per second.

The graphics story is a bit different. If you want a direct comparison of the GPUs' raw power, look at the Offscreen tests, which renders the same scene at 1080p resolution on all of the phones. If you want to know what kind of frame rates you can expect on the Z10's 1280×768 screen (to which the S III's 1280×720 screen is close enough to make the two comparable), look at the Onscreen numbers, which render the scenes at each phone's respective native resolution.

In all cases, the S III still falls right in the middle of the two other Android phones, but the iPhones benefit from Apple's emphasis on GPU performance over CPU performance in its platforms. The S III (and Z10) have enough raw power for most of today's mobile games, but they aren't pushing the performance envelope these days, and they have a bit less graphical power than other phones in the same price range.

Again, keep in mind that we're using the S III as a stand-in, and scores will vary slightly due to differences in the OS.

Browser performance

We're going to do two different things for our browser performance tests: we'll run some common benchmarks to see how the Z10's Webkit-based browser stacks up to Chrome for Android and the stock Android browser on the S III. We'll then do some actual pageview loading tests, since JavaScript scores don't always tell the whole story about browser performance.

To our standard SunSpider and Google Octane tests, we've added Mozilla's heavyweight Kraken 1.1 benchmark. The Z10's browser holds the line against Chrome in SunSpider, but it falls further behind in all of the other tests—its Kraken speed, in particular, is more than 33 percent slower than either other browser. Both Chrome and the Android browser have had more time to evolve and optimize than has the BlackBerry 10 browser, but these charts don't paint a pretty picture.

How does this actually impact page loading speed, though? Each of the pages below were loaded once for purposes of either signing in or requesting the desktop site, and they were then loaded three more times; the results of the three tests were then averaged. We started the stopwatch when we entered the URL and stopped it when all of the page's elements were fully loaded—we also used a mix of desktop and mobile sites just to keep things interesting.

Page

BlackBerry 10 browser

Galaxy S III (Browser)

Galaxy S III (Chrome)

Ars homepage (desktop)

4.4 seconds

3.7 seconds

5.2 seconds

New York Times homepage (desktop)

5.5 seconds

5.8 seconds

5.0 seconds

Gmail web client (mobile)

4.0 seconds

3.2 seconds

2.2 seconds

The differences demonstrated in the benchmarks don't usually carry over to actual page loading times, though. Loading the Ars and NYT homepages wasn't drastically faster or slower on any of the phones—usually between five and six seconds—while the Gmail homepage loads much more quickly on Chrome in particular. Whether this comes down to Chrome and Gmail being developed by the same company or the Android browsers’ general JavaScript superiority is hard to say.

As so often is the case with these kinds of things, any actual delays in page loading time relative to the Android browsers are things you notice if the phones are next to each other or you have a stopwatch out, but they're not typically noticeable if you’re just using the phone in a vacuum. BlackBerry’s JavaScript engine is generally slower on the same hardware than either the Android Browser or Chrome for Android, but realistically it's not a huge handicap.

Not cutting edge, but speed shouldn't be a problem

Our biggest concern with the BlackBerry Z10's performance isn't that it's bad, but that it's being sold against better-specced phones at roughly the same price point. Microsoft hasn't been able to move many Windows Phone 8 units despite packing the same kind of chips into $99 phones, and a $149 or $199 price (with contract) for the Z10 is only going to discourage new buyers. The Galaxy S III is in the same boat now, but it's a major phone with established software from a big player, and the odds are good that we'll learn something about its follow-up at Mobile World Congress next month.

That said, the Z10 uses hardware that's more than sufficient to give a good experience, and anyone who buys phones without really caring about the particular processor used inside shouldn't notice any deal-breaking performance problems. We'll be examining and discussing UI performance a bit more thoroughly in our Z10 and BlackBerry 10 reviews in the coming days—for now, the takeaway is that the phone's internals are generally up to snuff, but the handset seems just a bit pricey compared to its peers.

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Andrew Cunningham
Andrew wrote and edited tech news and reviews at Ars Technica from 2012 to 2017, where he still occasionally freelances; he is currently a lead editor at Wirecutter. He also records a weekly book podcast called Overdue. Twitter@AndrewWrites